Everytime I brew a pale beer (SRM 8 - 10) the beer is very cloudy for a few weeks, yet when I brew anything darker it is crystal clear within a week of being in the keg. I brew all my beers with S-04 yeast and tend to drink them very young - 1 week in the primary, 1 week in the keg, then straight into my belly. So why are my pale beers so cloudy? Thoughts?

Everytime I brew a pale beer (SRM 8 - 10) the beer is very cloudy for a few weeks, yet when I brew anything darker it is crystal clear within a week of being in the keg. I brew all my beers with S-04 yeast and tend to drink them very young - 1 week in the primary, 1 week in the keg, then straight into my belly. So why are my pale beers so cloudy? Thoughts?

I have noticed the same here, my hoppy pale ales have been consistently cloudy until my last, which is pretty clear. It has only been 3 weeks in the bottle as I do not yet keg, however, it was in the primary for about a month including dry hopping (2 oz, 1 of each Cascade and Amarillo, 7 days apart w/total time of 17 days...longer than I wanted) but it turned out great and as I drink one now that was chilled for about 8 hours, it is clear as crystal, and delicious!

Which leads me to consider settling time, which would come down to process and yeast strain (flocculation). I use WLP001 for my APA's, and have had better results with longer primary-ing. At any rate, give it some more time, ad let it chill longer.

If it happens to be chill haze from your process, then, no matter what you do haze will be a factor that longer conditioning will help with, but will not eliminate it. Having said that, chill haze does not affect flavor, only cosmetics.

Good luck, and keep researching as you brew, your beers will become better and your process will become more streamlined. Remember, chill haze can be reduced, but longer aging times will help to eliminate haze from suspended yeast.

Yooper right! My Sierra Nevad clone never cleared completely. I suspect it was the dry hopping. It alwasy had some haze. Not that I cared much, but after seeing how clear my cream ale was, it made me sad

Perhaps. I add 1.5 oz to my pale ale toward the end of the boil (0.5 - 10 min, 0.5 - 5 min, 0.5 - 0 min). I don't dry hop though. Right now on tap I have a brown ale to which I added 1 oz at 5 min and it is crystal clear. puzzling.

There could be some other factors here, but I'm not well versed in water chemistry.

It's possible that your mash pH is higher on the pale beers. My water is alkaline, and the pH is very high on pale beers since I'm not using dark malts to bring it down. So, I add some gypsum and sometimes CaCl2, depending on what my water spreadsheet says. I don't know how starch conversion, light colored malts and pH play out (I'm not nearly smart enough) but it's entirely possible that it's an issue like that.

What makes me simply blame hops haze, though, is that you say it does eventually clear. That makes me think it's either hops oils, or chill haze. I don't think a water chemistry issue would age out, especially that quickly.

__________________Broken Leg BreweryGiving beer a leg to stand on since 2006

I'm having a somewhat similar problem. I have been having a chill haze problems in all my beers until I brewed a robust porter recently. It was the first beer with a high quantity of roasted grains that I have brewed in a while, and it appears to be crystal clear (it's a little tough to tell because it's so dark).

Like Yooper said above, I'm thinking it may be a pH issue. More recently I have been adding salts to my mash to adjust pH, but I'm just going on calcs. I haven't been measuring my actual mash pH. It could be that the higher pH of the non-roasty mashes is extracting some extra stuff that's causing chill haze. I just got some ColorpHast strips, so this next batch I'm going to have to measure my actual pH and see if it matches up with my calculations.